PARENTS: Is cursive in schools a dying art?

April 14, 2011|By Kathy Lauer-Williams, OF THE MORNING CALL

What has happened to cursive? You know - those loopy letters that many parents recall endlessly copying in elementary school. It seems in the age of computers, cursive is another skill that has become marginalized for students.

I was surprised to learn that cursive is not required in the state of Pennsylvania. Last July PA adopted the Common Core State Standards for English, which omits cursive handwriting from required curriculum. Pa is one of 42 states so far that have adopted the standards.

I had been wondering what happened to cursive which I started learning in second grade, as my son went through second grade with nary a mention of the writing style. Now in third grade, he has an occasional "center" in cursive but it definitely isn't a focus and he isn't actually spending any time learning to write in cursive.

So is cursive obsolete? Is the only need for cursive to scrawl your signature? I'm not so sure we should turn our backs so quickly on cursive. For one thing, since my son hasn't really learned any fluency in cursive, he finds it very difficult to read cursive writing. And even though students are writing less and less longhand and relying more on the computer, sooner or later there will come a time when they have to write longhand and writing in cursive is faster and more efficient. As a reporter I know very well that not all situations are practical to write directly on a computer.

Don't get me wrong. I hated learning cursive. It was the bane of my elementary school existence when I aced all my subjects except dreaded penmanship, in which I invariably earned a C grade for my sloppy circles and truncated connectors. To this day my handwriting is illegible. People who see my reporter notebook often ask me if I'm doing shorthand. The truth is my longhand (which my mother always called chicken scratch) is readable only by me.

But my son is a different story. His printing is neat and ordered and I assumed his crusive would be equally well formed, but then I discovered cursive is a dying art.

Some teachers suggested I get some books on cursive and let him work on it at home. They said D'nealian is a good method. I'm going to try that. I'm not quite ready to give up on handwriting.